Sunday, January 31, 2016

Wildlife groups gather local petition supporting red wolf recovery

By Jeff Hampton
The Virginian-Pilot

01.31.2016

COLUMBIA, N.C.

Wildlife advocacy groups have collected a petition of landowners who support the controversial red wolf recovery program.

In
the past, landowners in the five northeastern North Carolina counties
where the wolves live overwhelmingly have opposed the program at public
meetings. But in this petition, 80 actually support restoration efforts
and want the program to continue, said Tara Zuardo, attorney for the
Animal Welfare Institute in a news release.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has received the petition, said spokesman Tom MacKenzie.
“We are evaluating their data,” he said.

After
years of controversy and litigation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
announced in October a study to evaluate – and possibly end – the
nearly 30-year effort to restore red wolves to their historic habitat in
Dare, Hyde, Washington, Tyrrell and Beaufort counties. A report is
expected later this year.
It comes after two years of cutbacks to
the program, according to a news release from the Animal Welfare
Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Endangered
Species Coalition. They say the Fish and Wildlife Service has already
eliminated the recovery coordinator for the program, stopped
reintroducing red wolves, stopped sterilizing and removing coyotes and
issued permits to landowners to kill individual red wolves.

Under
the 30-year recovery program, the wolf population grew from four pairs
introduced in 1987 to more than 100 individuals. Then in 2013, the count
fell to under 100 for the first time in more than a decade. The number
of red wolves roaming 1.7 million acres in eastern North Carolina could
now be as low as 50 animals.

Studies over the years conflict over
whether the red wolf is a separate species or a mix between coyotes and
gray wolves. Many residents of counties, where the red wolves live,
maintain the species has interbred with coyotes. The mixed breed preys
on livestock, small pets and on popular game animals such as deer, they
say.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone